The "Black People Tweet Like This" thing does not hold a candle to the "antisemitic British National Party members tweet like that" thing, in terms of windows into confusing and unfamiliar worlds.

It's all here: death, UFOs, swine flue as UN extermination plot, and typos.

‘Antarctica's Icy Lakes Home to Plethora of Viruses' ‘American Exceptionalism' 'Brit Tapes UFOs Beaming Up Water Buffalo'

from the UK today: 'IM NOT BEING RACIST BUT ETHNICS ARE PANDERING TO ETHNICS AND GAYS' 'I think am on another plant with you'

‘UN GLOBALIZED tyranny' ‘Flu Found In Denmark Minks' ‘FROM OUR PIG WITH LIPSTICK IN CHARGE' ‘FBI Boss Taken To School On Marijuana Reality'

'seek medical help & stop ur filthy acts & golden showers' 'Palestinians used by Arabs 2incite vilence Comeon Israel just build the Temple'

'#bestfeeling the joy when you see the look on someones face when they call you a "racist!" & you reply I KNOW!'

'Lucifer is Mechanical – God Miraculous: keep this in mind' Keep that in mind when? When you read the words *deus ex machina*? Actually...

'govt using Sesame Street/"elmo" to indoctrinate kids on H1N1' 'White Pride Emails' 'MightBeALiberal if u think hilary clinton isn't a dyke'

So. Here are some more data points for the "what Twitter does to your brain" scientists.

Look, you have a brain, we don't need to explain how stupid and precisely backwards this "net neutrality is government control of content" argument is. We just need to point out that among the many groups supporting net neutrality are the Christian Coalition, the Gun Owners of America, and Brent Bozell's Parents Television Council. All of them are in on the plot! Everyone's a Marxist now! (Except the Maoists. It is an important distinction that only Glenn Beck can make with any accuracy.)

And Glenn Beck is apparently running out of ways to scare people. Net neutrality? Did Glenn just pick this one to take on because he knew it'd piss off the internet?

Also, according to what appears to be his "about me" section, he's a big fucking homo who enjoys filling your life with his ass gas: "Hello my name is homo ray i fart on people." In addition to social flatulence, he wants to meet your mom so that he can "fuck" her. So romantic! And here we thought all alleged psycho killers were freaks.

See, a model named Liskula Cohen googled herself and found out that some anonymous and completely unread blogger called her a "skank" and so she sued to find out the identity of the blogger who called her a skank and it turned out that it was this girl she knew, of course, because who the hell else would bother to blog about how some random model is a skank?

Dowd aligns herself with Cohen, the wronged party, which is odd, because Dowd's entire career has been built on calling people names. But Dowd has also been a victim, herself, of people saying mean things about her, on the internet! (People like us!)

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I'd never come to work. I'd scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

Yes, well, we can both dream, can't we?

The argument is always framed as "I have no problem with being criticized, it's being criticized by anonymous cowards that is wrong and must be stopped!" Our position has always been, bullshit is bullshit, bylined or no. And this is bullshit:

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody's character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

But our very own MoDo has proved that you don't actually need anonymity to shred somebody's character before the entire world and not be held accountable.

Dan Abram's "GossipCop" reminds us that Perez broke the news of Fidel's death on this day in 2007. (And had GossipCop been around back then, they would've promptly "fact-checked" Perez by printing a routine denial from Fidel Castro's publicist.) And ever since that death, the Cuban media has periodically released new photos of a gaunt and sickly looking Castro hanging out in various flashy Adidas tracksuits.

Yesterday, the Cuban state-run tv aired video of Fidel that they claimed was shot on Saturday, and then the state-run youth newspaper ran a photo of a fit-looking Fidel meeting with the President of Ecuador. But the real news is that Fidel is wearing a short-sleeved white workshirt instead of one of his Run-DMC costumes!

Let's take a look back at some of Fidel's best posthumous looks.

Apparently, on August 1 and 2, a "hacker" "hacked" the websites of 20 members of congress, replacing all the text with "H4ck3d by 3n_byt3 @ Indonesia H4ck3rs." How did Indonesia H4ck3rs do it? Are they brilliant computer masterminds, like in the popular film Hackers?

Sort of! From Roll Call:

House officials say that the hacker accessed the site by guessing passwords assigned to Member offices by GovTrends, a Web design company that hosts the sites of about 100 Members. Some offices never changed the passwords, which GovTrends founder Ab Emam called "obvious" and easy to guess.

Ah, the old "guessing the easy-to-guess password" trick.

Rep. Spencer Bachus is pissed that no one told him that his website had been hacked for a couple hours. He wrote a letter about it and everything! He demands answers.

Bachus asked the CAO to provide copies of the Web logs and "evidence supporting GovTrends speculation" that the hacker simply guessed the password.

"Please provide an explanation of the vulnerability that allowed this situation to occur and what is being done to prevent it from happening again in the future," he wrote. "It is extremely important that my constituents can trust that information provided to my office is kept confidential and secure."

Well, Spencer, you could've changed your password. It was "password1," wasn't it? Admit it.

Back in 2004, the "Rick Perry's wife is going to divorce him because he had a gay affair with a staffer" rumors made it all the way to The Austin Chronicle, but his wife never did actually divorce him, so the world will never know how gay Rick Perry is. But, you know, it's a term people have been known to search for. And so it ended up in this massive tone poem of the Texan internet user's psyche.

democrat rick perry education rick perry election rick perry email rick perry email address rick perry family rick perry gay rick perry governor rick perry governor of texas rick perry governor texas rick perry immigration rick perry inauguration rick

SCANDAL! Someone viewed the source of Kay Bailey Hutchison's campaign website and searched for the word "gay" for some reason! And Kay Bailey Hutchison is clearly buying her SEO software from people who design porn sites!

Kay's spokesman deserves a raise for this response:

Sadosky said: "We did not know these offensive word associations were being searched for by hundreds of thousands of Texans everyday nor do we condone the computer-generated existence on our Web site. They will be removed promptly."

The Hutchinson campaign had no idea so many thousands of Texans were curious about how gay Rick Perry is! Whoops!

We are going to wait for someone smarter than us about cybersecurity and the intelligence community to explain it to us, before we try to explain it to you. But here is what the Post says.

Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the pilot called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian government agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block malicious computer codes.

AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications firm, was the Bush administration's choice to participate in the test, which has been delayed for months as the Obama administration determines what elements of the Bush plan to preserve, former government officials said. The pilot was to have been launched in February.

And it is basically another "the NSA promises not to break any laws despite having the ability, if not explicitly the authority, to do whatever the fuck they want" thing, we think.

Oh but that is just one of the eye-shuttening comments from the famous shouty internet guy and former important talker-about-powerful-people in this wonderful WWD profile of Wolff.

Wolff used to be a beloved and serious New York magazine writer and book author. (This amazing portrait of Wolff as a young porn star dates to the 1979 publication of his serious novel about disaffected '70s youth.) And now he runs a website, and is sometimes on Page Six because he had an affair with an intern. No matter, though! He was right, back in the day, that newspapers and magazines were in trouble. But nowadays he tends to be wrong about things much more often than he is right, and in fact he does not really seem to care about being "right" so much as he cares about GRABBING SOME EYEBALLS. The internet has destroyed him again!

For him, grabbing eyeballs in an accelerated, competitive news cycle has meant the cheap high of a provocative headline and choosing a hot-button subject based on its momentary buzz, not on whether he has an argument about it. And if he lacks the command he had when opining on New York power players, well, the old days of cocktail party chatter as feedback are mostly gone. The noisy post on David Carr got 1,000 pageviews, but "Is Barack Obama a Bore?" got 80,000. That few care as much about the media as it cares about itself is now measurable.

He would've gotten 800,000 views if he'd written "Is Barack Obama a Muslim Bore." Does he know?

Critics point out that even as Wolff is dancing on newspapers' graves, Newser relies on their content. He responds the site is increasingly relying on native online sources like Politico, though it overwhelmingly features newspaper content summarized by paid writers.

And, hey, what is Politico again? It is a money-losing website attached to a possibly profitable little local newspaper. Not that you would know this if you read his Vanity Fair piece about how revolutionary Politico is. The one that ran months after Wolff said no one cared about Politico and it would never make money. We guess over the course of a couple months he came to see how good they were at grabbing eyeballs with provocative headlines and such!

These days, Wolff lives in the East Village, and he doesn't have a doorman anymore, and he is rude to waitstaff, which is actually pretty much unforgivably assholish, we don't care what you wrote.

City Paper editor Eric Wemple, a veteran Post Kremlinologist, has a lengthy reported story on the firing of Froomkin. It is very good! But it has its flaws. Wemple really, really wants to trash both the Post and the idiot liberals who trash the Post, so he quickly dispenses with the "it's because Froomkin was too liberal" theory, mocking the bloggers who've made that argument.

But, well, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald are both terribly excitable and prone to hyperbole, demonization, and over-simplification—but they are sure as hell not idiots.

Still, we accept that ideology was not the reason! It was traffic! "'His traffic had gone way down,' says Fred Hiatt, the paper's editorial page editor. Froomkin himself uses the same talking point: 'Traffic definitely did go down.'" And why is that?

"'A chronic problem had been promotion of the column on the homepage. My readers complained that it was harder and harder to find all the time,' says Froomkin." But that might be because of the ideology thing we dismissed earlier! So we hedge: "Zero: The amount of sympathy Froomkin will get from other Posties on how visible and navigable his stories have been on washingtonpost.com-that's a common affliction at the paper."

And, meanwhile, the Greenwald/Sullivan argument that Froomkin bugged the shit out of everyone else at the paper by having bigger balls and calling them on their bullshit (this is what they mean by "liberal" btw)? Well it's true that they refused to let him print anything that too much resembled "media criticism," which was a lot of his work.

"Marisa Katz, the paper's Web opinions editor, says the dinner story 'read more like a Howie Kurtz media column, or one of Dan's Nieman Watchdog items, than a post focused on the Obama White House.'"

God, the day Howie writes anything as perceptive about the media as Froomkin we'll send him flowers.

But in the end, yes, we believe the "traffic" thing. We also happen to believe that "traffic" is a shitty reason for a newspaper to fire a reporter, and further we are pretty sure that his traffic would've been better if he'd been promoted better, and the reason he wasn't promoted better was maybe because he bugged people on the print side, and of course, at the end of the day, "traffic" is not actually a standard they'd apply to a print columnist. And most of their print columnists fucking suck.

So yeah, $100,000 a year is a lot for a struggling paper to pay a guy with falling page views, but how much do they pay Dana Milbank? Or Richard Cohen? And what's the ROI on those guys? (Actually, the traffic for those two is probably pretty good, because everyone on the internet fucking hates them.)

As we mentioned, Von Brunn was a painter. Just like Hitler! But the one example of his work that we have (which is no longer for sale at AskArt.com) is, uh, interesting. It is a amalgam of Fragonard's The Reader and Picasso's Woman With a Book. A clever recontexulaization of classics by Renaissance and Modernist masters! By a 89-year-old White Supremacist who just killed a man at the Holocaust Museum!

A much more likely internet archive find from Mr. Von Brunn: an insane, rambling, copy-pasted post on some random forum about how Barack Obama has not shown us his birth certificate—a story familiar to readers of World Net Daily, one of those sites that was so outraged when DHS suggested right-wing nuts might be dangerous.

But yes, Von Brunn was leaving his full name, all over the internet, spreading his nutty views, like a common Craigslist killer. It's just weird. Is every comment section troll actually secretly a violent old racist? We just thought they were regular racists.

Whelan, a serious and respected legal mind, has been on a tear against Sonia Sotomayor, because at the end of the day, he is just a partisan hack who blogs for the National Review.

So this blogger named publius approvingly linked to some other blogs that criticized a dumb argument Whelan made, and then publius called Whelan "a smart guy with outstanding legal credentials" who "enjoys playing the role of know-nothing demagogue." Beyond the pale!

Whelan's thoughtful response to that unconscionably vile rhetoric was to respond with a post outing publius as John Blevins from the South Texas College of Law. Publius had been blogging for years under the pseudonym in order to protect his job (he is pre-tenure) and so as not to upset the more conservative members of his family, but when you are mean to Ed Whelan, you pay the price, Blevins.

Because Whelan is a very mature and reasonable person, as his emails to Blevins demonstrate.

Three cheers for Ed Whelan, Protector of the People's Right to know! (Specifically, the people's right to know the identities of random liberal bloggers, not so much the people's right to know what he, as a member of Bush's OLC, advised the president regarding the legality of torture.)

The brilliant model of new journalism site The Evening Huffington Express-Telegraph is getting a shitload of content for free, because as we all know, nothing that can be accessed for free is worth paying for, which is why music is so great, these days.

They have stepped up their game, though! They are auctioning off an internship! For the charity, sure, but also because they can! The "internships" in New York media that can be yours as long as you're related to Jann Wenner or Graydon Carter (or, if you aim lower, as long as you can afford to work for free while getting your useless $150k degree) certainly worked out very well the magazine and publishing industries, right? So let's do that, on the internet, now, but even more extreme.

We are auctioning off our own job, here at Gawker, for $40,000. Just PayPal it to us. Then Jumpstart Your Career, as a Blogger!